Closing the Achievement Gap
While several CSBA bills pass through, crucial measures are held in the suspense file On Aug. 13, the Legislature’s respective appropriations committees dispensed with their suspense files. The suspense file allows the appropriations committees to consider bills with a fiscal impact that exceeds a certain […]
A new report from the Center for MH in Schools & Student/Learning Supports at UCLA finds that current efforts to address barriers to learning and teaching, while valuable, won’t provide lasting progress until policymakers adopt student and learning support systems that are unified, comprehensive and equitable.
A fact sheet published late March by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) identified several alarming trends that highlight the motivation behind CSBA’s call for greater state accountability in helping local educational agencies close achievement gaps.
The old adage, “students learn to read, then read to learn,” focuses on ensuring that students achieve literacy proficiency by third grade, at which point, the curriculum becomes more difficult and their reading skills are put to use to learn the material. However, since the pandemic, fewer students are proficient readers even into their middle and high school years, where teachers are not prepared to equip students with the basics. The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF), a national nonprofit organization, recently released a report that provides research-backed recommendations for supporting older readers.
More than 30 percent of California’s approximately 30,000 school-aged youth in foster care regularly experience some of the highest rates of chronic absence and exclusionary discipline. A new brief from Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) details how changes in foster youth classification status impacted attendance and discipline rates in four of California’s CORE school districts — a group of several of the state’s larger school districts that test improvement theories at the school and district levels to provide the infrastructure for multi-district collaborations.
The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on March 12 examining the national landscape of school improvement and strategies that helped schools exit comprehensive support and improvement (CSI) and the challenges they faced. Under Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, states are required to measure the performance of their public schools. They must also identify three categories of low-performing schools for support and improvement, including those that need CSI — representing the lowest-performing schools in the nation.
A package of bills sponsored by the California School Boards Association (CSBA) to address the education system’s most pressing problems — including persistent achievement gaps and a lack of accountability for results at the state level — unanimously passed the Assembly Education Committee, with all four bills advancing […]
A webinar hosted by the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), “Community Schools as a Locally-Driven Strategy for Student Success,” detailed the investments states are making in the model and how strategies are paying off.
A report released Feb. 25 by the curriculum and assessment company Amplify calls out the urgency of implementing data-driven instruction if local educational agencies want to improve literacy outcomes and close achievement gaps.
A new case study from WestEd and the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools examines how state and local policymakers can work together to better support migrant students, those experiencing homelessness, or children involved in the foster care or juvenile justice systems — groups known as “highly mobile youth.”
